Comment by matheusmoreira
6 days ago
I always use Opus 4.8 at max effort for everything. The $20 subscription didn't have enough tokens, but the $100 one had too many of them. So now I just max out Opus in order to maintain 100% weekly utilization.
6 days ago
I always use Opus 4.8 at max effort for everything. The $20 subscription didn't have enough tokens, but the $100 one had too many of them. So now I just max out Opus in order to maintain 100% weekly utilization.
I'm a senior skilled developer and I find Anthropic $20 + Open AI $20 + OpenCode Go $10 offers more value than $100 on any particular service.
Juggling between all different models/agents is quite simple with Zed.
A caution about OpenCode Go though, the entire company seems to be run by AI so there's lot of billing related issues with zero support. I subscribe new every month as I lost money due to double payment with automatic subscription.
For non coding related tasks I use local models.
P.S. If anyone is interested to read more about my setup, let me know I'll publish a blog post.
I've been running about the same stack for well over a year now, Anthropic cheapest + OpenAI cheapest + z.ai coder (black friday offer).
The Z.AI is a bit wonky, so now I'm moving to Openrouter for Qwen+Kimi+Deepseek?GLM
My summer project is to figure out a proper agentic system where a "big" model does the planning, but automatically uses a cheaper one for the grunt work. Having Opus to config edits is just stupid :)
> My summer project is to figure out a proper agentic system where a "big" model does the planning, but automatically uses a cheaper one for the grunt work. Having Opus to config edits is just stupid :)
My company pays for the tokens so I don’t care. Biggest model and max everything. The slight risk of a smaller model making a mistake is more expensive than just running the bigger model all the time.
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Would love to read that blog post. I'm toying with running local AI model with Claude and GLM as well depending on a task. Pretty decent success but it could be better.
Here's the blog - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48748443 .
>>For non coding related tasks I use local models.
What sort of hardware are you using to run local models? And how do you use them?
4090 RTX laptop and a M4 Mac Mini, I've posted more information in my blog mentioned in another comment.
I’m interested!
I've posted in another comment above.
I'm a heavy enough user that I have both the OAI and Anth $200 plans. I always use at least 50% of my weekly Opus quota at Extra setting (meaning I use double the limit of the $100 plan, at minimum). Max I rarely touch because it is twice as slow and the incremental capability gain is minimal. Usually if Opus can't sort something well at Extra, the answer isn't to use Max but to hand the issue off to GPT-5.5 at XHigh.
I too have settled into a kind of dual Claude/GPT model setup. I will often use one to review the other's work, or critique the other's plan in some way. Sometimes I'll have Claude implement a feature one way, then have GPT do it the other way, then have them both review each other's implementation. Then synthesize a final plan from the previous implementations+reviews.
I might just be having fun with models, but I have actually noticed their capabilities vary somewhat, and so my (perhaps vain) hope is that by using both, one can catch each the other's blindspots. It's still unclear to me if that's consistently happening, but I am making substantial progress in my personal and professional projects, so something seems to be working.
> Sometimes I'll have Claude implement a feature one way, then have GPT do it the other way, then have them both review each other's implementation. Then synthesize a final plan from the previous implementations+reviews.
I've done variants of this a number of times, but feel like it was a generally waste of my time to then have to compare them and write up which parts I liked or disliked: if the output is something substantial, each will have its pros and cons. Clear-cut wins aren't very common. Of course it could work well if we automated the whole thing with an orchestrator; you just need a model with actual good taste (according to your own preferences) ... so we'll have to compare all the models to find that one
Yes, same, between the two of them I feel like results are just better because they have different priorities.
At the same time, I’ve invested in tooling that prints and lints architecture I want, so which model is less of an interesting decision, because the results tend to be very close.
Agreed I think your strategy is optimal. This is what I landed on as well
Me too, I rarely hit limits anymore on the $100 Max, except for the brief period with Fable
This is actually very counterproductive with Opus 4.8 - you are wasting a lot of time.
For Opus 4.8 training with overblown internal dialogue and second opinions - Max effort burns just tokens and wastes time without much value. Spinning wheels.
Even with Opus 4.8 I have to try pretty hard to maintain 100% weekly usage. I'm actively trying not to be efficient at this point.
Now that the ban is lifted, max effort Fable 5 is gonna solve this problem quite neatly. Fable to plan and review, Sonnet for the implementation.
Wait, never mind that. Subscribers will only have Fable for a week.
Why are you optimising for token use rather than getting whatever tasks you're trying to do done? Max effort Opus will happily sit there talking to itself for five minutes fixating on every tiny detail while Sonnet or even Haiku will just blast through the problem and be ready for the next one in seconds.
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